An English comedy
made in France, having to do with detective fiction, the unseemliness of it or
not, the writing of it, the business end.

A question of
killing your wife, the nosy bishop she’s anxious to avoid calls Scotland
Yard, who descend in force.

The botanist with
a gifted pen is offered a hundred pounds under his other name to express his views
of the horrible crime, “I have no imagination,” he says, refusing.

Hounded from home
and hearth by a hue and cry in the newspaper headlines, he and his wife go to ground
in a low bed and breakfast where a fastidious maniac on a bicycle (“butchers
kill animals—but me, I kill butchers”) hangs his cap (Jean-Louis
Barrault).

Nevertheless, the
botanist takes the case, only to find his house a shambles, overrun with “a
whole flock of detectives.”

“I’ve
often wished to read your books,” says one whose method when solving a
crime is to sleep on it, “the mystery dissipates.”

Bobbies are digging
up his cherished mimosa, it’s scandalous.

The milkman, who
dowers the place with gallons for love of the daughter, is jailed as a suspect.

The inspector, first
seen wearing a dress undercover for the bishop’s speech against such
works as our author’s The Model
Crime, interrupts proceedings at the “Murder House Beer Stand”
as he breezes by, hot on the trail.

An incriminating
music-hall program belonging to the bishop (last seen as a Scotsman in full
regalia) has been lost by him on or near the premises, he is a married man with
a whole flock of children, the botanist’s wife is an artiste.

One of the
funniest goddam
films ever made.

Caryn James (New
York Times) and Jonathan Rosenbaum came to see its virtues, but Time Out Film Guide says Carné “fails
to extract all the fun possible from such rich material.”

Quai des
Brumes

The title is a
mock, all is precise, exact, perfectly formed, no detail is wanting to the
purpose.

Carné’s
métier completely.

A godfather with
a penchant for religious music, the girl fleeing him, a soldier AWOL, petty
hoodlums and Le Petit Tabarin,
a nightclub.

So,
“a masterpiece of poetic realism” (Philip French, the Observer) and so on, a small story on
the docks at Le Havre, not going anywhere.

Bergman has the
same story in Hamnstad.

Hotel du Nord

“Oh, ces
sales gosses avec les pétards!”

The themes are
later reworked in Les Portes
de la Nuit, for example, le dénonciateur et la prostituée,
the young lovers who embrace against the gates of night and so forth, a long histoire in this instance, a long delay
of l’amour et la mort that ends on Bastille Day
with the title of Carné’s next film in the girl’s mouth.

Le Jour se Lève

The subsequent
analysis by Carné, Prévert and Laroche
in Les VisiteursduSoir is all that is needed.

A very funny film
often cited as an Existentialist saga. The two orphans meet and fall in love,
“we’ll have lots of kids,” he says, “and put them all
in homes.”

Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles,
as a play, is roughly contemporaneous.

Les VisiteursduSoir

Two
emissaries from Hell, signed, sealed, but not yet delivered, and the Devil
himself.

Many films such
as Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson go into it, many
others such as Cocteau’s La Belle
et la Bête come from it.

In the grief of
the Occupation, the advice is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “most like
a monumental statue set”.

“One day in
1942, I was so anxious to see Marcel Carné’s Les VisiteursduSoir, which at last had arrived at my neighborhood
theater, the Pigalle, that I decided to skip school. I liked it a lot. But that
same evening, my aunt, who was studying violin at the Conservatory, came by to
take me to a movie; she had picked Les VisiteursduSoir.
I didn’t dare admit that I had already seen it,
I had to go and pretend that I was seeing it for the first time. That was the
first time I realized how fascinating it can be to probe deeper and deeper into
a work one admires, that the exercise can go so far as to create the illusion
of reliving the creation.” (Truffaut)

Les EnfantsduParadis

The work is
simply like being in Resistance headquarters with every message coded as a line
in a nineteenth-century tale. Prévert had this very
happy idea of treating the Occupation as his field of operation and letting it scud
and flicker among the stock characters of a comédie
set in a suitably fantastic domain, the pantomime stage and environs.
That’s where Carné comes in, dressing out the conceit like the most
ambitious camouflage ever devised.

Every word is
electric, or nearly, starting with the title of the first part, The Boulevard
of Crime. The camera shows, not the grand avenue down which
shock troops strode, but a lively crowded street full of amusements, among
which is Truth (Arletty), a lady up to her diddies in a tub, gazing into a hand mirror. A rich
spectator’s pocket is picked, Arletty is
accused, but the grand auguste mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) has observed the crime and
delineates the culprit in pantomime.

That is
essentially the layout of the whole film sketched in ten minutes. The villain
of the piece is Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand),
whose occupation is Public Writer, i.e., he indites
letters and documents for the illiterate public, with a sideline fencing stolen
goods. “So many ugly people,” he says, “how much better it
would be to get rid of some of them.” Writing plays is an ambition of
his, though again he’s a crackpot æsthete who
finds tragedy an inferior medium because it’s “depressing.”

AnselmeDebureau (Etienne Decroux) announces the extravaganza within, featuring his
own “incomparable” self, who has “performed in the harem of
the Grand Turk amid 83 Turkish ladies.” The performance introduces the
image of a fifteen-year-old girl menaced by dangers (Arletty
describes her own youth this way) and rescued. Barrault’s
precise and vociferous pantomime begins after Chaplin and attains the classical
art.

The simplest
question, the merest remark takes on the flavor of the time. “Who gave
you this flower?” “Be careful, they’re waiting for
you.” The stuff of farce and romance becomes the drama of Occupation at
every moment.

At the Gorge
Rouge, a tavern named for a former proprietor whose throat was cut there,
there is a Brueghelian dance. Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet is simply mentioned, but the murder scene from Othello is
acted by the great Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur). Gautier is cited as a critic.

The tone reached
by Prévert and Carné is sometimes simply keening, as
when an actress on stage beweeps her slain husband in
rehearsal (this is reversed in performance as a brilliant parody of Cyrano
de Bergerac’s opening scene, Lemaître
exposes a bad play, mocks the authors, and has the policeman lie dead rather
than himself as Robert Macaire), or the unparalleled
frenzy of Barrault thrashing a huge bouquet of flowers with a stick because he
cannot bear the sight of them in Arletty’s
dressing room.

The second part
is named for him, the ideal dreamer and moonstruck good-for-nothing who bears
witness, The Man in White, and introduces an admirer of Arletty’s,
the Count de Montray (Louis Salou).
“Several years have passed,” says the screen, and those are
lacerating words. Barrault’s doctor advises him
to “go and see Baptiste,” a famous joke.

Lacenaire berates the Count. “When a king is betrayed,
that’s tragic.” Why? “Because Fate deceives him,”
volunteers Lamaître. “But when it happens to
you or me, it’s only buffoonery.”

Love itself, Arletty says and Barrault
finally agrees, is simple. But under the Nazi Occupation literally dictating
running times, Prévert and Carné foresaw that who
loved who and why and for what would all be forgotten in the great joy of the
Liberation.

Les Portes de la Nuit

The Liberation
has come and gone, the war is not yet over. The clochard of Destiny
foresees the end (this was a particularly bitter pill for critics to swallow, Tom Milne calls it “a hollow film” in Time
Out Film Guide).

The absolute
clarity of the position gives it a striking ease in Prévert’s
screenplay that is borne out in the filming, which again combines the themes
brought into play all along in Carné’s films on this subject, the statues
in Les VisiteursduSoir notably “come alive” in the most
perfect way, the infinite subtlety of the approach also calls a spade a spade,
the demolition magnate and his collabo son are
exposed, “the most beautiful girl in the world” dies, murdered by
her profiteer husband, and so forth. One has been warned,
that is the construction put on events by this same Destiny, more or less in
vain, always correctly.

l’air de Paris

Here precisely is
the theme of Huston’s Moulin Rouge,
a simple answer to Niblo’s or Mamoulian’s
Blood and Sand.